Paul Matthews, the character played by Nicolas Cage in the new satire Dream Scenario, is many things: a husband, a father, a tenured professor of evolutionary biology, a font of insecurities and jealousies and resentments. But more than anything, in this strange, heady and ever-shifting polemic, he is a human meme.
Paul tends to satisfy both the original scientific definition of a meme as coined by Richard Dawkins (“a noun that conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission”) and today’s cultural argot: a viral idea, remixed and shared, spread like so much disinformation until its utility becomes exhausted.
Paul becomes a meme through neither intention nor action. He simply starts appearing in people’s dreams. In one of his daughter’s nocturnal reveries, he rakes leaves in their backyard, watching inertly as she is raptured into the heavens. It turns out his students are dreaming about him too, as a similarly static observer in their fearful or apocalyptic visions. So too are strangers. When a former girlfriend publishes a blog about the phenomenon, countless commenters respond that they, too, have seen Paul Matthews as an extra in their dreamland. The next thing he knows, Paul is an internet sensation who is being interviewed on the news.
It’s a quirky story that hugs the border of sleep science and pop science — there are talks of Sprite sponsoring Paul — until the dreams take a consistently violent turn, and this conjured version of Paul becomes not so much an amusing Hitchcockian cameo but a Freddy Kreuger in professorial tweed. The meme has soured.
Dream Scenario is Norwegian director Kristoffer Borgli’s third feature and his first in English. The first half is imbued with the quiet desperation and dyspeptic surrealism we associate with Charlie Kaufman. It reaches for Kaufman’s highbrow audience, with its references to Jungian archetypes and the Mandela effect and the writings of Robert Sapolsky, and Cage’s performance captures the feckless middle-age paralysis common among Kaufman’s protagonists: “Why don’t I do anything” in these dreams, he wonders aloud; surely in real life he is a man of action, isn’t he? The dreams are other people’s, but perhaps they should be his own, as they initially seem to manifest his own feelings of inadequacy and stasis.
But the similarities end there, for Kaufman wouldn’t have reached for the sociopolitical implications of the back half of Dream Scenario, which transmogrifies into a Black Mirror episode. As the dream meme known as “Paul Matthews” mutates into a homicidal villain, and his students begin to feel traumatized by its intrusions, the real-life Paul Matthews becomes a persona non grata — benched from his university, banished from restaurants, his marriage on the brink. Dream Scenario evolves into a satire of cancel culture’s absurdist terminus. As if to underline this message, Matthews’ scrappy publicist (Michael Cera), who had previously promised to work with Barack Obama on his client’s behalf, now offers him interviews with Jordan Peterson and Joe Rogan — and perhaps even Tucker Carlson! — positioning Paul as the latest culture warrior in a world run by snowflakes. Will he succumb to the inevitable apology tour, when he didn’t even do anything?
Far be it from me to curb my enthusiasm for a movie that endeavors to capture a worrisome trend in the zeitgeist. But by the time Big Tech co-opts Paul’s story for a dream-control gadget, Borgli’s movie almost unravels. It risks obscuring the timeless and the universal by emphasizing, with the specificity of its cynicism, the tenor of the moment.
Ultimately, though, Dream Scenario has worthwhile points to make, its intellectual wheat easily found amongst the chaff. It’s an extension of sorts of the self-effacing character Cage adopted in 2022’s The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent. In both, he embodies the entertainment-industrial complex’s what-have-you-done-for-me-lately fickleness, the way it can so flippantly spit out and trample the figures it had lionized only moments before. (The previous film just happened to be a lot more fun.)
The allure of fame, even in someone else’s REM journey, is uniquely intoxicating — and fleeting. For just like in a dream, it ends just when it starts to get good.
DREAM SCENARIO. Director: Kristoffer Borgli; Cast: Nicolas Cage, Julianne Nicholson, Michael Cera, Tim Meadows, Dylan Gelula, Dylan Baker; Distributor: A24; Rated R; Now playing at most area theaters